upton-on-line
22nd
November 2002
Special
Kiwi Nostalgia Issue
In
this issue
Upton-on-line
reports on a recent outing to the Stade de France for a rendez-vous with
Franco-New Zealand rugby
tribalism, British MP Austin
Mitchell’s regurgitations on pavlova
and a uniquely French scandal
involving a parrot.
Black
and blue
As
acquaintances can attest, upton-on-line has not exactly lived and
breathed rugby over the years. Initiated
in the rites at the age of nine, he found charging around freezing cold
playing fields in bare feet less congenial than practicing the piano
(much to the disappointment of parents one suspects).
It was the unnecessary sort of collision of allegiances that
boarding school promotes. The
result has been many years of artful deception in taxicabs and party
political social functions where conversation is routinely expected to
dissect the minutiae of last Saturday’s game.
But
six years’s enforced schoolboy rugby leaves its mark.
And when you’re an offshore kiwi, the sheer iconic importance
of the game is overwhelming. Encouraged
by his physiotherapist (who, having the advantage of physical possession
half an hour at a time, has talked nothing but rugby and the approaching
test for some months), upton-on-line joined thousands on the trek to
Paris’ Stade de France for the big game on Saturday last – (with
physiotherapist in tow!). It
was a chance to feel overwhelmingly outnumbered and out-chanted as well
as introduce two little New Zealanders to their national game.
Out-numbered
we certainly were. It had
seemed, on the train out to the stadium, that there were rather a lot of
black and white painted faces, silver-ferned skulls and kiwi flags. But
in the cavernous stadium (which France had, justly, hoped might host the
next Olympics but one), the sense of being a tiny corpuscle on a tide of
Gallic adrenalin was pretty overwhelming.
(If anyone is thinking of changing the national flag to black and
white, they should think again: against the rivers of blue, red and
white, the doughty kiwi contingent looked like a protest contingent.)
Armchair
experts have delivered all the commentaries anyone needs on the
performance of the teams. Upton-on-line
wouldn’t dream of treading where even experienced commentators like Trevor
Mallard and Murray McCully
carefully weigh each pin-pricking verdict.
Besides, being parked almost directly behind the goal posts at a
distance that seemed like the Florida control room of the war on terror,
the action was easier to interpret by listening to the reaction of the
French crowd than anything visually discernible.
(Jonah Lomu, in
particular, seemed to stir a primal groan from the crowd if he as much
as looked like being near the ball – and a frisson
of national pride every time he was swamped.)
Suffice
to say that from upton-on-line’s vantage point, les
Bleus seemed to have so much possession they seemed at times more
interested in progressing laterally across
the field than down it but
that is probably just the observation of a total innocent.
New Zealand’s backs, by contrast, were able to devote the
evening to a really thorough workout on defensive play.
The 20-20 score seemed unjust to a French team that was
miraculously dynamic as it put into practice Bernard
Laporte’s requirement that every player has to be able to do
everything, anywhere, anytime. (‘Polyvalent
‘is the French for this – so much more elegant than being a
Jack-of-all-trades).
The
most significant thing about the experience, though, was the feeling the
French have about New Zealand
rugby. There seem to be, in
the minds of French rugby fanatics, two missions: one is playing the
rest of the world, the other is playing New Zealand.
Upton-on-line has heard all about it on
the physio’s table and across
the table at the OECD. There’s
some indefinable thing about the All Blacks with the French.
They’re treated as some sort of exotic, connoisseur’s choice,
rather like those puffer-fish that Japanese gourmands risk death to eat.
The haka is awaited as
a near-religious experience.
And
it was rather nice that the French Rugby Federation handed every
spectator a small slip announcing that the evening’s game was
dedicated to Dave Gallaher,
the All Black who died at Quesnoy in 1917 during the First World War; in
respect of which spectators were enjoined to afford the haka
“all the dignity and respect” that “our New Zealand friends
merit”. A link between
nations and peoples that could never be secured in an age of commercial,
televised posturing.
Your
own team always gets it in the neck
The
slightly numb anti-climax at the game’s end sent tens of thousands of
French home with all of those sentiments intact but a palpable sense of
frustration. So too for the
kiwis who jostled their way to the (astonishingly efficient) trains that
drained the crowd, thousands at a time at intervals of just a couple of
minutes. The kiwis within
earshot seemed to have very clear ideas about their team’s
shortcomings. That seems to
be the way of it with sports – it’s always easier to bag your own
team’s short-comings than admit the strengths of your opponents.
That
certainly was the case with the French.
Here, for example, is what Philippe
Guillard had to say in Monday’s Le
Monde:
“The
French XV, too frenetic, searching for gaps anywhere on the field,
were going to run out of breath quicker than a hunting dog chasing a
pig. Through being too
keen to break up the game for the sheer hell of scattering their
opponents, they overwhelmed themselves by the breadth of the field
they opened up even faster than they could bewilder the New
Zealanders. As a result,
they often finished up breathless and disoriented, forgetting too
often to take the fight right into the heart of the All Blacks’
defence or to kick the ball behind their lines when the going got hot
- tactics which have been at the heart of France’s truly legendary
victories over New Zealand. That
was a pity because our [i.e.
the French] forwards gave their opponents a pretty good lesson in
rugby, in the scrum as well as in the line-outs which set up an
attacking line that never really managed to succeed faced, it has to
be said, by superior re-grouping and handling.
A pity, but so much the better for all that, because to beat
the All Blacks without being convincing would be to devalue the mythic
status of the deed.”
Maybe.
But Upton-on-line’s untutored view is that if the French keep
playing like this, New Zealand crowds must start to accord the Blues the
same respect we once reserved for the Springboks.
In the meantime we’d better hang on to the America’s Cup to
guarantee at least one area of undisputed bi-lateral sporting supremacy.
Pavlova
beyond its shelf-life
Upton-on-line
grew up (as did we all, didn’t we?) in a household where ‘pavs’
were whipped up and served up at the drop of a visiting great aunt.
They were always a near-run thing – if they rose too fast in
the oven, an ominous fracturing led to the collapse of the central
meringuial crust necessitating the emergency extrusion of vast
quantities of whipped cream into the ensuing caldera.
On the other hand, left too long under tents of gauze to keep the
flies off in the midday heat, these fragile casts from the culinary kiln
subsided in a viscous pool of sickly sog.
Their shelf life? About
30 minutes.
All
of which makes Austin Mitchell’s
attempt at a 30 year re-heat all the more heroic - and indigestible.
Upton-on-line was invited by New
Zealand Books to review the aging British MP’s ‘book-of the
television-series’, Pavlova
Paradise Revisited published by Penguin Books.
For diasporans spared the televised antics, the short verdict on
the book is – don’t bother. But
for those tempted to sample Mitchell’s return to the provincial
kitchen that spawned The
Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise, here is the full review:
A
re-heat for the microwave age
For
those old enough to remember it, The
Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise was a funny, disrespectful
but good-natured account of what it felt like to be a clever,
progressive Left Brit in New Zealand at the end of the Holyoake era.
Pavlova Paradise Revisited
is the not quite so funny, more consciously respectful but not so
good-natured account of how the same now-aging Brit feels about New
Zealand in 2002.
In
between times there have been a few changes.
Those who remained at their stations – or arrived in between
times – have never been the same since.
One thinks of Simon
Walker who, like Mitchell, arrived bright as a button, dazzled us
all on television and then drank the lethal waters of Rogernomics.
Fashionable left wing venom was transformed into pinstriped
libertarianism. Not so with
Mitchell. Whatever
transformations he records (with an eagle eye and some good sense along
the way), his own prejudices remain firmly intact.
And
therein lies the tension of this book.
The New Zealand of 2002 is, when read back to back with the
earlier volume, almost unrecognisable.
And the critique of the process that transformed it – the
economic liberalisation of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties – is
subjected to unrelenting vitriol. Yet
paradise is somehow safe and the diagnosis offered bears the tarnish of
partisan hagiography: “Helen
Clark climbed out from under the monetarist rubble to rein in market
liberalism … and in its pre [1999] election coalition with the
Alliance, the preserving jar of social democracy, Labour took on the job
of tilting the balances back.”
The
economic analysis Mitchell offers will, rightly, invite the fiercest
responses. If you have a
penchant for undiluted Brian
Easton with a seasoning of Bob
Jones on monetary policy this is your conspiracy theory.
Variously described as the economic lunacy of the last two
decades, the triumph of economic sado-masochism and malevolent
mysticism, something called ‘monetarism’ is ritually exorcised.
For those of us who thought it was quite a limited theory about
targeting assorted monetary aggregates as the best way of beating
inflation, monetarism is revealed to have been a weapon of economic mass
destruction with almost unlimited yield.
And
when the facts don’t always oblige they’re simply changed.
Never mind that from a high of around 11% in 1992, unemployment
had fallen to 6% just three years later.
In Mitchell’s account everything in the 1990s got worse.
Never has revenge through the election of one’s friends been
sweeter.
Stir-fry
pavlova
Yet
the polemical retribution being meted out doesn’t invalidate the
social and cultural analysis he offers which can be acute enough.
Penguin, not one suspects without some hesitation, classifies Pavlova
Paradise Revisited as sociology.
In truth it is something of a smorgasbord.
Mitchell attempts an improbable stir-fry of reminiscence, potted
economic history, social commentary, travelogue and applied prejudice
with plenty of one-liners for the stalls.
The
worst of it is the first chapter which works hard to re-connect with the
staccato irreverence of the original Pavlova
– the twelve letters to ‘Keith’ boiled down into 16 welcome rules
for the new arrival in ‘smoke-, nuclear- and almost GM-free, world
class demi-paradise’. No
doubt the publishers thought the book needed a good front-end rev-up to
launch readers through some pretty turgid television transcripts (this
after all is ‘the book of the TV One series’).
People like Warren Cooper
and Bob Harvey may have
utterly gripping camera presence, but being asked to plough through
their pronouncements in black and white is not a kindness.
Even Jim Hopkins, who
is fatally funny in the flesh, starts to pall on the page.
Worse is to come when we are asked to endure the organiser of
Project Southland telling us that Invercargill is full of clever real
estate agents or Mark Burton
gravely informing us that New Zealand has “some of the finest mountain
walks and national park tramps in the world.”
At times, the effect of this sort of leaden promotional pap seems
even to invade Mitchell’s normally ebullient prose.
But
there is no denying the assiduous way in which the handicap of being a
non-resident commentator is denied by way of endless small allusions to
the mini-scandals that have entered the nation’s folk lore in the
intervening years.
Peter Plumley Walker’s watery fate surfaces briefly in the
torrent as do Tuku Morgan’s
underpants and Helen Clark’s paintings.
This man’s cultural connectedness is up-to-the-minute.
So
are his sensibilities. All
the old prejudices (private schools, Hawkes Bay gentry etc) are given an
airing, of course. But even
the robust Mitchellian shit-sifting capabilities (en
passant, kiwis don’t have them) have been subtly irradiated by
political correctness. Without
question, the most sanitised chapter has to be that on women, given over
almost exclusively to the asphyxiating niceness of Shipley,
Clark, Lee
and Hobbs in conference.
All Mitchell has to do is provide the briefest of codas in which
young male culture is pronounced ‘defensive, escapist and resentful’
while that of young women is ‘realistic, serious and dedicated’.
The
chapter on Maori is scarcely more revealing – more talking heads
(celebrated Maori ones to be sure) and some boiler-plate-correct
verdicts on Pakeha attitudes:
“Kiwis love to cut the heads off tall poppies, but brown ones are
slashed nearer the roots. The
obsession is ignoble, inhibiting and shows more than a touch of desire
to keep Maori in their place. It
is essentially jealousy.” I
prefer Mitchell’s more general verdict that New Zealand has “grown
more complex than a generalisation and offers less scope for simplistic
summings-up.”
The
cruelty of smallness
It
is in exploring what smallness and distance does to New Zealand’s
society that Mitchell regains the lightness of touch needed to coax from
kiwi readers a willing suspension of fondly cherished beliefs.
Much of what he has to say about the hallmarks of smallness rings
true - the intimacy and friendliness of a population inoculated against
the pretensions of political and business elites; the gold-fish bowl
exposure of leaders, the nosiness of the ‘invigilated society’.
Whereas the inhabitants of populous countries are forever seeking
privacy and escape from the ubiquity of human contact, people in New
Zealand, Mitchell notes, “come as a pleasure not a nuisance, a
pressure or someone in the way.”
On
the other hand, the sheer lack of people in the way means short career
ladders and a less testing environment that cannot easily hold its
talent. In this respect he
draws a sensible parallel with Ireland – “the world is a stage for
talent nurtured in the sustaining smallness of both countries”.
His other, more hackneyed conclusion – that if Ireland can be a
Celtic Tiger sucking in skills, industries, investment and talent, so
can New Zealand – smoothly ignores the tyranny of our geographical and
geo-political isolation. Being
a political partner in an enterprise drawing together 350 million of the
richest people in the world is a bit different from being the pluckily
independent outlier of an even more sparsely settled and much more
humanly-hostile continent.
And
this is where Mitchell’s thesis is problematic.
Because he assumes that with the death of distance (as he calls
it), comes the death of conformity and cultural and political
dependence. The first part
of that is true. Released
from the thrall of a colonial time-bind by travel and communications, a
much more exciting sort of society is possible.
But it’s the second part of the transformation that has to be
in doubt. There is just too
much of the happy fairy tale about a conclusion that, following some
soul-bearing from a cast including the likes of Chris
Laidlaw, Sam Neill, Brian
Corban and Ian Fraser,
can claim that
“these
voices, like so many others I heard, speak of a confident sense of
identity, the emergence of the feeling of difference and nationhood that
intellectuals have looked for decades …
[that] has emerged out of the combination of the characteristics
instilled by a small, intimate society, hardened by the economic ordeals
of rejection, excessive liberalism and the slow build back to normality,
then energised by globalization.”
Do
we have here emerging nationhood or just “the future we’d looked
forward to in the ‘sixties but by a route we couldn’t possibly have
conceived of then” as Austin, the self-styled ‘apprentice
nationalist’ puts it. In
the same way that Austin’s prediction of sunlit economic uplands sits
uncomfortably with his wholesale denial of the economic reforms that
brought New Zealand to where it was by the late ‘nineties (“growth
came like rain on the monetarist desert”), his verdict of national and
cultural maturity doesn’t sit easily with his analysis.
In
fact, he seems on much safer ground in judging New Zealand to be a
“Copy Country” prey to an endless supply of fads.
In the same way that imported pests, lacking their predators,
wreak havoc with our ecology, imported enthusiasms frequently flare into
fetishes in the absence of the sheer inertia and cruel indifference of
large societies. Mitchell’s
characterisation of New Zealand as a limpet needing a rock (one of
several images that survives from his earlier work) seems truer today
than ever.
Indeed,
Mitchell’s own conclusions on cultural identity – “a province in a
global culture and a small parochial market within it”- support a much
more nuanced conclusion than the somewhat shrill nationalism that
appears to be the book’s political objective.
The extent to which a provincial and parochial version of global
culture can underwrite a fiercely independent national enterprise
remains an open question.
For
all their cultural depth few European countries could imagine
maintaining the effort and institutions needed to maintain the sort of
separated political and economic existence New Zealand faces.
In a globalising world, they cherish (some would say indulge)
their cultural particularisms safe beneath the umbrella of political and
economic co-existence (if not union) that big numbers can provide.
For
the Irelands of this world, cultural identity has been secured at the
price of a high level of economic and policy dependency on the greater
European enterprise. Not
all dependencies are bad and Mitchell is right to acknowledge (however
much this must grate in post-Belichian New Zealand) that the dependent,
colonial period allowed the country “to grow and develop as part of a
wider whole” thereby providing an antidote to the insularity of
distance and smallness. This
is undeniable.
But
it is another thing to claim that the destruction of distance
necessarily brings with it the destruction of dependency and the birth
of the sort of self-originating, self-critical and self-sustaining
society that would justify Mitchell’s nationalist millenialism.
Hedonistic consumerism (after all those decades of
import-licensed misery) with a national indebtedness that continues to
pile up inexorably and an absence of obvious political or security
partners does not add up to the “dynamism and confidence of a nation
which feels itself to be going somewhere.”
What
we have, in Pavlova Paradise
Revisited, is another link in the chain of Britannic utopianism that
has been visited on us repeatedly since early days.
That it survives in this brittle shape says much about the
dystopia that generally follows in the wake of fondly held dreams.
Ornithological
fascism
New
Zealand readers will recall the ruckus that surrounded the Virgin
in a Condom affair at Te Papa some years ago in which curators found
themselves standing in the trenches to defend sacrilege or freedom of
speech depending on your outraged point of view.
That was all about a touring exhibit.
The City of Paris finds itself in the midst of a similar storm
although the subject matter is altogether more drôle.
Le
Figaro
(Wednesday 20th November) reports that the decision by the
city’s Musée d’Art Moderne to spend roughly NZ$400,000 on a living
work of art has councillors in a similarly indignant lather.
Entitled Ne dites pas que
je ne l’ai pas dit (Don’t
say I didn’t say it), the masterpiece by the Belgian artist Marcel
Broodthaers is in fact a parrot that sits in its cage along with a
table and two palm trees listening to a recording of a poem being read
by the artist himself. Outraged
opposition councillors have questioned spending such a large sum on an
artwork with, literally, a life.
The
species of parrot in question has, apparently, a life expectancy of
roughly ninety years, but given that the ‘work’ was created in 1974,
quite a lot of its perch life appears to have fluttered away. The
parrot’s defenders on the Council have wasted no time in elevating the
matter to one raising matters of the highest principle.
For councillors to intervene in purchase decisions, a Green
member has opined, would be to open the door to fascism!
Upton-on-line
cannot confirm whether the parrot itself is capable of reciting the
poem. But Le
Figaro reports that, faced with the prospect of incipient fascism in
the Hôtel de Ville, the parrot has been silent in defence of itself
leaving it to progressive councillors to defend its right to be watched
listening to the same poem, in the same cage, for the next half century.
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